She took her own life

I mostly can't tolerate euphemisms. That makes me an asshole sometimes. While I was sponging myself with pools of self-absorption and pity during that last post? At almost the exact same moment, a friend of my youth was googling ways to die. She was reading about the Japanese, the painless lonely exits. The things you can do in a condo building, by yourself, where the firemen will find you and the rest of us only hear on facebook. The worst voicemails you can hear.

I was supposed to go to a party with her the night before she did it. I didn't call. She didn't call. This isn't totally unusual, but you never know which decision is the one that'll maybe change everything. If I called? And said, I'm not doing well. Would she have answered, I'm not doing well either. Maybe we would have had seven or eight martinis between us and told each other the wise things we only came up with in concert. Because she was so smart.

Because we had no secrets. There are fewer than three or four people in the whole wide grey sphere that know me, from every angle, all my bits. She did. I never knew anyone who saw things so clearly. If this is the friend that commits suicide, it's obviously a rupture in the way of everything.

I didn't know I could cry so much that my skin would hurt, on the outside of my face. That my neck would ache stiff and that someone I could call, I can never call again.

She really was the centre of a tiny galaxy. I could see everything spiralling out from her tiny wrists. Planets and moons bobbing lightly from her fingers. I wish you could have known her too. I wish to Christ she wasn't gone.

I used to worry about blackholes, and then one appeared, right in the centre of my chest. I miss her. She was there last week, she was there when I was sixteen. Telling me on my birthday to skip class with her, and go downtown for piercings. We did, me the navel, her the tongue. Watching each other fill up with tears, and happy on a June bus home.

It's a loss so limiting. It's the feeling when they cut too much from my hair, and my hands keep reaching for it, slipping off the empty space. It's that, but in my heart.